The Commander Drives Like a Lunatic
by Of Questionable Veracity
Summary: The Mako is capable of some truly impressive maneuvers, if driven by someone competent. If driven by someone with no concern for their safety, it's capable of so much more.


The Normandy came in hot and low. The thin atmosphere of the planet helped, of course, but a considerable amount of the manoeuvre was style. Not that anyone was complaining. Tali and Garrus were too busy clinging to whatever they could grab a firm hold of for that.

"You guys ever done a landing like this before?" Shepard asked, flicking a switch and not looking back. They then flipped the switch again. And again. And a few more times for good measure. Shepard frowned. What did that switch do again?

"There wasn't a lot of call for this sort of thing back at C-Sec," Garrus said. Seatbelts inside the Mako were conspicuous in their absence. On closer inspection, it looked like they'd actually been removed on purpose. Except for Shepard's. He still had his.

"That's a damn shame! Very little in life like falling out a ship in an armoured vehicle, ready to ride forth across the surface of an unknown world! I mean, I knew all the worlds I dropped on. But I can't imagine this being that different!" He said, rubbing his hands together as the Mako jostled about. It wouldn't be long now.

"Did you say 'falling'?" Tali asked. She even raised her hand which – while cute – was useless since Shepard still wasn't actually looking back as he talked. He was just shouting.

"It's controlled falling! More like dropping, really. Speaking of which, three seconds! Hold onto something now!"

Three seconds did not leave a lot of time for protests and by the time Shepard's passengers had got their wits enough together to ask pertinent safety questions it was far too late. They were now falling. 'Dropping', rather – sorry.

The experience was a singular one. It was very much like the floor dropping out from under all of them. Because that's sort of what it was. There was screaming but the source of it was unclear as everything got very noisy. Shepard's tastes in music – and preference for volume – did not help. It was human music that clocked in at over a century old or nothing. Luckily at least it wasn't far down to the surface thanks to Joker's fondness for low-altitude delivery.

In a normal Mako the jets cut in automatically to soften descent but Shepard had found this feature far too namby-pamby and so had torn those bits. He activated manually, and trusted to his (considerable) abilities to keep everyone in one piece. It worked, of course. Like it always did and probably always would. They touched down shaken, but breathing.

"Ah! Perfect, as per the USHE. Heh," Shepard chuckled. Saying 'usual' was for amateurs.

Compared to arriving, actually moving off in the Mako was lovely. The suspension was such that even the reasonable bumps and dips of the plain they'd been dropped onto were impossible to notice. Truly a triumph of engineering. Garrus and Tali began to relax, exchanging glances as they did so.

"So what are we here for, Shepard?" Garrus asked. Shepard hadn't actually told them anything about where they were or what they were doing, at least not yet. He certainly seemed to know what he was doing, at the very least. The way he'd taken control of the Normandy as if though he'd done it dozens of times before, knowing exactly where to go and what to do when he got there. It was a little disconcerting, actually. Wasn't this his first day as a Spectre? Didn't seem like it.

"Just having a look round, you know. Oh, and also we got a message about some Geth up to no good in the system. So there's that. Keep eyes peeled!"

Tali and Garrus exchanged looks. They were not filled with confidence.

"Shouldn't we be following up on, you know, the leads?" Garrus asked, as delicately as possible.

"All in good time, Garrus! All in good time," Shepard said as he wagged a finger, foot pressing down onto the pedal on which was written the word 'GO'. In marker. The Mako shot forward, the roar of the engine filling the compartment. From what few technical specifications of the thing Garrus had seen once (idly thumbing through some surplus magazine or other one time) it should have been whisper quiet. This disconcerted him.

"Stick with me, Garrus. We'll go around the galaxy, we'll right wrongs, find cool shit and we'll bring that mean old Mr Saren to justice," Shepard shouted to the back of the Mako, jerking the wheel violently from side to side. This seemed to have very little influence on where it actually went.

A map screen was pulled down and consulted briefly, though the icons were too small for those in the back to see. Shepard seemed excited though, tapping out a waypoint on an area of interest.

"Hey sweet a crashed probe, hang on a tick," he said before slamming his foot down and spinning the wheel once more. This time it actually seemed to do something and the whole vehicle veered to the right, nose going up sharply a moment later as they started to climb. Garrus and Tali barely had an instant to appreciate the ridiculous ratio of the hill Shepard had chosen to go up before they went tumbling straight to the rear of the crew compartment.

"I love the Mako. This thing is just unbelievable. Climbs just about anything short of a cliff. And unless someone's actively shooting at it it's basically indestructible – how's that for engineering! It's even got jets! Ooh, a crevasse – hold on." Shepard was talking as if nothing in the world was wrong and they weren't all almost horizontal. With a surge from the engine they levelled off but only for a moment or so before a lurch upwards sent them sailing through the air. Garrus and Tali had no reservations about screaming again at this as the Mako tumbled end-over-end all the way to the bottom of a cleft in the landscape. The Mako was utterly unscathed, and somehow so was everyone in it. The vehicle even managed to right itself, though it was still at an alarming angle.

"Right! Helmets on! Not you Tali, you're way ahead of us," Shepard said, disengaging the harness holding him to the seat and heading straight to the Mako's access hatch, slapping his helmet onto his head as he did so. Garrus barely had enough time to pick himself up from the heap he'd ended up in to do the same himself before the hatch opened. By the time he and Tali had stumbled dazedly out onto the surface of the planet and after Shepard the Commander was already squatting over the mangled and rusted wreckage of a crashed probe. His arm had disappeared up to the shoulder in and he rummaged around for all he was worth.

"The things people leave lying around, I tell you," he said. With a wrench and a spray of sparks something within the probe gave way and Shepard pulled his arm free, holding up a handful of indeterminate items for closer inspection.

"Armour piercing rounds? Motorised joints for armour? Who put these on a probe? What beautiful genius knew that I would here one day, at this exact spot, at this exact moment to receive this bounty? I thank this individual, wherever they are. You chose well what to stuff into a probe! Well, I mean, screw the joints obviously but the AP rounds are going to be useful! I can feel it."

Shepard regarded his acquisitions with pride before unslinging his rifle and inelegantly cramming the ammo module into a slot on the side. Or what was assumed to be a slot. The vigour with which he slammed his fist into the module to get it to fit suggested that he had perhaps picked the wrong place. It fitted in the end. Just.

"Everyone back in!" Shepard shouted, running back to the Mako with the other two close behind.

Once inside Shepard picked out another spot on the map – which, when Garrus got a closer look at it, seemed to be marked in several arbitrary places – and opened up the throttle again to get them all moving. Following a precipetous climb (which sent Garrus and Tali tumbling to the back once more) things actually levelled out for a time they enjoyed an expansive stretch of relatively flat, featureless terrain. For a given value of 'enjoyed'.

Then they took a sharp right turn as Shepard had spotted something on the radar.

"There's gold in them there hills," he said with a wink.

Turned out he was right, too. There was literally just a chunk of gold sat out in the open. It defied belief but the Commander didn't seem to mind, jumping out to drop a beacon off before jumping right back into the Mako.

"Someone'll come and pick that up later. Every little helps!"

Neither of the others were sure what this meant or who he was talking about. The time for questions had long-since passed however, and they knew this. On they went. Onwards and upwards, back into the mountains. They assumed Shepard knew where he was going. It looked like he was following a waypoint, after all.

"Nearly there...ah, mind the bump."

Garrus and Tali barely had enough time to exchange glances before the Mako clipped the very top of a hillock and spun on its nose, swinging around wildly and ending up facing backwards towards the way they were meant to be going. How the suspension hadn't been smashed to bits was anyone's guess. Shepard just laughed.

"See what I tell you? Indestructible," he said. Then he frowned, as though something had only just occurred to him. "Of course if someone does start shooting at it the whole thing comes apart like a tissue in a rainstorm but who's going to be shooting at us down here? Oh. Wait. Geth, look."

Rockets and sizzling bolts of indeterminate energy whizzed past the Mako as a clutch of Geth vehicles and turrets opened up on them. Shepard, reversing with one hand operating the turret with the other, didn't seem phased in the slightest. Instead, he seemed to be scanning the terrain.

"Aaaaand there. That'll do," he said, bringing the Mako back the right way around (and letting off a wild shot from the main gun as he did so, hitting nothing). Dodging another volley more through luck than anything else Shepard sped over a gentle rise that overlooked whatever it was the Geth were guarding and brought the Mako round in a screeching one-eighty.

"You might want to hold on for this bit," he said.

The Mako rolled forwards, bouncing over the ridge. The instant its body flopped down and brought the firing angle on the gun down to a viable one Shepard fired, immediately slamming the whole vehicle into reverse as the gun cooled down for the next shot.

This continued for some time. Shepard was at least vaguely accurate, scoring more hits than misses, but this was cold comfort to his poor jostled passengers. Both of them were starting to feel quite ill by the time he'd blown up the turrets and all but one of the walkers. They felt palpable relief when he didn't go backwards after firing and instead drove straight into the remaining Geth, knocking it down and rolling right over.

Then he stopped.

"I think it's stuck underneath us..." he said, cocking his head. The Mako was shivering in a most unusual way. Shepard pantomimed putting on a helmet before doing so himself and then disembark again. Sure enough, he was right.

The thing was well and truly stuck. The head was trapped beneath one of the Mako's wheels and it's whole body twitched as it tried and failed to shift the weight pinning it. It wasn't firing at them, for whatever reason. Even so Garrus and Tali made sure to stand well clear. Shepard had no such reservations.

"Look at that Geth Armature," he said, shaking his head and nudging the thing with his foot. Garrus did a double take. No-one had seen the Geth for hundreds of years. As far as he knew, no human had ever seen a Geth at all.

"How do you know what's it called?" he asked. Shepeard tapped a finger to his helmet.

"The targeting wotsit in my HUD calls it that," he said. Garrus considered this, but it wasn't a good answer.

"How does it know?"

"...I don't know."

There was an uncomfortable moment of silence where all involved felt they were naught but cosmic playthings. The Armature continued to squirm silently and uselessly. Shepard was the first to speak.

"Let's shoot it."

This at least was something all of them could get behind. Guns folded out and in a flurry of fire the Armature's barriers were stripped and what little remained of its structural integrity was shredded. The light of its eye went out and it finally stopped moving. They took a moment to appreciate this.

"I wonder if it has armour piercing rounds in there somewhere..." Shepard mused. He thought better of investigating it, however. Briefly he wandered over to the trio of Geth computer terminals standing out in the middle of nowhere that had previously been guarded by what was now just smoking wreckage. The terminals were non-responsive. Nothing he did work. Shepard frowned, hands on his hips.

"You'd think these would be important, wouldn't you? Maybe they'll be important later. Still seems odd to just have them here. But what do I know?" He said. Garrus, who'd been checking his map, pointed to the horizon.

"Map says there's a Geth outpost maybe a click or two east of here. Think it's worth investigating?"

"Oh, most certainly," Shepard said. Then he sighed, head hanging. "You know, I think we have a very long journey ahead of us."

"...it's only a few kilometres, Shepard," said Garrus. He felt he was missing something and it looked for a moment that Shepard might tell him what. He didn't though. He just sighed again and patted Garrus on the back, wandering back towards the Mako.

"Tali! You're very quiet. What's up?" He asked as he passed her. She shrugged.

"I don't know what's going on," she said, quite honestly. She really didn't. Shepard chuckled.

"Do any of us, really?"

**END**


End file.
